amelianotthepilot's Reviews (835)

gah i love this series

yet again another intricate insanely interesting dark academia story following our six 

this was eh. definitely a foreigners idealized image of nyc in the winter which was fine i guess. lots of food moments and italian american-isms.

our main character Iris, is a chef from London, her mother has recently passed away and she’s escaped a manipulative ex boyfriend and now is living in NYC trying to live the dream. She’s found work at a noodle restaurant who’s owner is her gay male best friend 🙄 (what a tired trope) and she also lives in the building. After a series of events she ends up helping our leading man, Gio, an italian american restaurant owner, figure out his family’s lost gelato recipe which Iris happens to know. 

first off it starts with a random chapter set on valentine’s day of Iris being rude to a random man (guess who this turns out to be) cause he took the last book at a bookstore. 

The book then jump cuts to September’s San Genarro festival in Little Italy and doesn’t bring up this bookshop moment until wayyyy later at which point I literally thought it wasn’t coming back.

I also feel like there was a weird confusion around her parents and the love interest’s parents that left me thinking half of the book that this might turn out to be an incest plot 🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏼‍♀️ maybe i just wasn’t paying attention enough but Iris’s mother was in a band together with two men who were a guitarist and a drummer. Her mother also dated one of the guitarist’s brother, who is the restaurant owner and Gio’s uncle that he calls papa. For me it was unclear that Iris’s mother had the baby with the drummer not the guitarist, and that the guitarist is Gio’s dad. Very confusing tbh and I spent have the book in fear it was incest

I dont understand the hype for this book. I feel like I remember people raving about this a few years ago but I truly found this whole book horribly depressing and meaningless. It gave Holden Caulfield vibes in the worst way. 

I guess you could say its a feminist book representing women in the worst way, women can be horrible too, women contain multitudes. I'm also pretty positive it doesn't pass the reverse Bechdel test (men are rarely mentioned and only in reference to sex). Which I guess is interesting... idk overall I thought it was terribly boring and depressing.

The main character is in her 20s, both her parents have passed away which she says she has come to terms with but clearly still deeply affects her. She has decided she wants to sleep her life away. She goes to a bad therapist complaining of sleep problems so she can get prescribed increasingly wild drugs. She then takes a cocktail of drugs in efforts to fully sleep through the rest of life to varying success. Her therapist is an extremely hippie unhinged bad therapist, her best friend is extremely vain and fake, her deceased mother was an alcoholic and uncaring. Overall every single character was unbearable and annoying and I don't feel like I particularly learned or gained anything from reading it. 

This book is truly so boring. Classic to the other Selection books nothing happens until the very last chapter and then it's absolute chaos. 

this story adds absolutely nothing 

idk why this isn’t just in the normal book

Yet again this was bad. First off I would not call this a "book 4" it is a spin-off duology about the daughter of the original characters. Second off this daughter, Eadlyn, is so annoying and privileged she is not fun to read. Eadlyn spends the entire book being a type-A ass focused only on work and not understanding her privilege or where any of the other characters are coming from, the world revolves around her at all times and barely anyone puts her in her place. We are now 20 years after the end of the 3rd book, Eadlyn will be the first Queen of Illea and her parents ask her to do a Selection in order to create positive press, however, she sucks and instead generates a bunch of bad press. Overall the story is sorta slow and boring, I think because it's from her perspective instead of the selected boys perspective and she barely talks about the selection somehow. Instead the book focuses on her trying to do political work and desk work and then every once in awhile very clinically doing some selection dates. All the boys seem to blend into each other except for Kyle, the son of two characters from the OG books, Henri, a foreigner who barely speaks English and has a translator with him, and Jack, the boy who attacks her. 

The last few chapters of this book are where all the action occurs and someone finally puts her in her place. But also the book consistently mentions how old Maxon and America are but if it's only 20ish years in the future....they're only 40? 

I will say I am consistently confused by the world-building. At this point the class system has been slowly dismantled by King Maxon...so now it's just a normal monarchial society...? However the countries named in this series are absolutely wild. We have Illea (all of North America and Central America), Russia (is apparently the same I guess), Italy (also apparently the same), France (also the same), the "German Republic" (I guess Germany took over the rest of Europe... that's... not great), "New Asia" (which is presumed to be all Asian and South Asian countries...????), and Swindland (SwedenXNorwayXFinland...which is also....rough). I have truly so many questions about this world including where the hell is Africa, Australia, and South America and why the hell are there these super countries but also why would new countries be named like the shipname of the old countries... so strange. This is only the beginning of whats wrong with this book and series in general...

Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman discuss a variety of topics in a jokey way through the lense of their relationship together. I don't really know either of them and I've only seen Nick in Last of Us and a few eps of Parks and Rec so I'm probably not the demographic for this. It was fun but I didn't feel ~changed~ from it or learn anything substantial.

A mother gives her 13th daughter to Death and Fortune rather than raise her. Instead of killing her Death and Fortune take the girl as their goddaughter and find her a place in a castle as a servant. She becomes close to the Princess of the castle eventually swapping places with her and stealing her place. She will do anything to survive and cares about no one because no one cares about her but eventually her past and lies will catch up to her.

I really enjoyed this story it's a very spooky and intricate tale of female rage. All the characters were very complex and interesting and I enjoyed the multiple deadlines rushing our characters to the end. However, I didn't really love the beginning. It wasn't until I was about halfway into the story that I was finally invested. I also didn't love the ending. It almost seemed like the author realized she backed herself into too much of a corner and just reversed it.  But I did like the little interludes that were told as tales before each section and I think the end section interlude is my favorite. I also like what she did at the end but not how we got there. The germanic words and culture were interesting but not well explained so I spent most of the book skipping over the words I didn't know since they weren't really explained. I loved the gods aspect and I love a good enemies to lovers and a good morally grey main character. I also loved the casual lgbt+ representation (including lesbians, gays, and a demi character!).